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“Marketing Automation has allowed us to be very personal in terms of the message we send to our customers. Click through rates on some of our automated programs has tripled what we are used to seeing with traditional campaigns and our conversion rates are a lot higher.”

News Coverage

February

If you’ve ever tried to shop from a mobile phone, you likely understand the perils of browsing and buying from your device. The customer experience – and thus, conversions – is often negatively impacted by various mobile browsing issues creating the “browse-to-buy gap.”

Anyone anxious to see what's coming out of IBM's acquisition of behavioral marketing specialist Silverpop will have to wait a few more months.
Officials have some news to announce regarding the Silverpop technology but won't release it until later in the year.

November

If you're looking for tips to get more out of your holiday program, or if you think it might have some potential weaknesses, below I've highlighted five common mistakes with strategies to correct them.

Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations at Silverpop, an IBM Company, shines a light on key issues in email for 2015. Loren's colleague Chris Clapham, Account Director EMEA at Silverpop, will be among the speakers at The Figaro Digital Marketing Conference in London on 27 November 2014.

October

Email continues to play a pivotal role in the B2B marketing landscape.Marketing Sherpa states that 60% of marketers say that email marketing is producing ROI for their organization, demonstrating the continued value of the channel to B2B marketers.

August

As of December 2013, 58 percent of all top performing companies were using marketing automation according to a Forrester report. That number has only increased since then. Why? Because automation’s benefits are impossible to ignore in the current marketing landscape.

Things are good at Silverpop, the email service provider. The Atlanta, Ga.-based provider had the best revenue growth year-over-year in the first quarter in six years. It was acquired by IBM last month. It's got 5,000 brands using it and 25,000 marketers. It's gotten some praise in the industry by analysts who say it gets marketing automation and its regarded among the visionaries for the concept of behavioral marketing.

Today's customer is growing accustomed to researching and purchasing across multiple channels, even for a single transaction. The best omnichannel marketers understand this, and it shows in their advertising, messaging, and customer interactions.

Despite rumors of the death of email, it remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media — nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined, according to research from McKinsey & Co.

Although Silverpop was acquired by IBM in April, Kevin Bishop, VP and General Manager of Enterprise Marketing Management at IBM, said he does not expect any significant shifts in Silverpop’s overall business strategy. He made the remarks during Amplify 2014, Silverpop’s customer event.

April

To begin the B2B buying process, many prospects go to the web sites of potential vendors to get a feel for what each company can offer. Since the company web site is often the first touch point for potential customers, vendors must find ways to provide relevant content up front.

The content you need for your next campaign could be right under your nose. Your team can save time, effort and resources by repurposing your company's existing content to reap great results.
Evo, an outdoor lifestyle retailer, discovered how to leverage some of its already-crafted content to build an email campaign that increased clickthrough 904% and open rate 160%.
To learn more about how evo successfully seized this opportunity, keep reading.

March

Imagine a customer interacting with your mobile app on a smartphone. She completes tasks and unlocks a rewards discount. The next day, sitting at her home desktop, she visits your website, and, voila! — her rewards points display along with the discount offering.

Mobile’s not really the new thing anymore. And marketing automation, in spite of the fact that it is tripling annually and still unused by more than 90 percent of non-tech companies, isn’t all that new anymore either.

Silverpop has rolled out product updates to CoreMotives, its marketing automation solution that runs within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The release follows a year in which CoreMotives product revenue increased by 54% according to company officials.

The Georgia Department of Economic Development (GDEcD) and Gov. Nathan Deal recognized 53 Georgia businesses that entered new international markets at the first annual GLOBE (Georgia Launching Opportunities By Exporting) Awards on Feb. 17.

One way Merriam-Webster defines “abandon” is “to leave and never return to (something),” but many of today’s e-commerce firms don’t seem interested in embracing such a bleak definition. Instead, many are viewing so-called “browse abandoners” – those who have looked at items online but left a site before putting them in a cart – as opportunities. They’re betting that with a little friendly nudging, visitors can be persuaded to re-engage and take the next step in the buying process.

January

How are you measuring customer success? Are you able to measure your efforts so that you can adjust and improve over time, while also eliminating tactics and strategies that are not giving you the return that you need to have the highest levels of success? Are you able to explain to management how effective your budget investments have been in contributing to pipeline and revenue?

December

Last year, we declared 2013 the year of the customer, writes Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at Silverpop. Consider the customer revolution under way. With buyers privy to more information, access and choice than ever, lower prices and better products have become little more than minimum requirements. Given that landscape, how can businesses distinguish themselves from the pack?

Google has gone nuclear on email marketers in 2013. In May, it shuffled promotional emails into a separate tab in Gmail inboxes. Now it has now taken away a key tracking mechanism marketers have traditionally leaned on.

Last week, Gmail announced some big changes regarding images in emails. Now, users will see all images displayed in their messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android. Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers.

Marketers will be faced with two choices as 2014 dawns: continue to run marketing for marketers and push out generic promotional messages, or run marketing for customers and deliver tailored content to them. That's the resounding theme of a series of predictions by the team at marketing software provider Silverpop. Seven trends they predict are:

It's hard to believe, but the holiday season is just around the corner. With the majority of our thoughts centered on this busy time, it's also important for marketers to be finalizing budget plans for 2014.

SilverpopTM today announces the launch of Revenue Analytics. This new application gives marketers a simple, out-of-the-box solution for measuring how much revenue their marketing activities are generating.

While renovating your email program might seem daunting, it can yield high-impact results that are well worth the time and money spent. The best marketers know how important it is to consistently evaluate—and re-evaluate—email marketing programs. In some cases, even small tweaks to an email program or campaign can return notable outcomes.

It's a wonder that marketers haven't universally lost their wits trying to understand the omnichannel consumer. Unlike customers' trek along the predictable path of yesterday's purchase funnel, today's customer journey looks more like the travels of a spirited bumble bee. This flurry of activity can make customers' motivations unclear—thus making the need for marketing technology crucial.

It is clear that marketers can no longer treat all prospects alike, as sending out the same email to everyone no matter who they are or where they are in the buying cycle is not likely to yield stellar results. While the ultimate goal is to make a sale, it is becoming more important to develop a rapport with buyers and understand what drives their purchasing decisions. That was the message of several speakers at the recent Digital Marketing University event in Philadelphia held by Silverpop.

Digital marketers are constantly pressured to justify their budget spending, and one of the simplest ways to help nail down solid return on investment numbers is to properly identify leads, a panel at the Lead Generation Summit 2013 said.

It’s fitting that there’s a kind of social media silo that we create around ourselves that limits our perspective (mine is movies and equestrian artwork). After all, there’s no way we could take every bit of information in without going a little crazy. Fortunately, the fine folks at Silverpop have done it for us — creating an overview of how movies large and small utilized social media this summer.

Wimbledon, The Ashes and The Lions - institutional British sporting events, all running for well over a hundred years, and this year we've been lucky enough to have all three in one summer. But, for marketers, these events have evolved into more than just summer spectacles. They're starting to be looked at from a new, social perspective.

Smart Content is designed to enable marketers' websites to greet visitors by name and offer individualized content. "Say a customer named Jim comes to visit a website," explained Bryan Brown, Silverpop's vice president of product strategy. "The website would recognize Jim as a loyal customer with 3,000 reward points" and offer a corresponding reward when it greets him.

Marketers' nirvana is cross-channel personalization. Digital marketing technology provider Silverpop aims to help marketers achieve that with Smart Content, a tool designed to provide deep website personalization capabilities, similar to those currently found in email marketing.

Gmail's new tabbed layout that Google announced in late May and introduces a tab that filters marketing emails from the standard inbox has sent marketers running to their email vendors for answers over its potential impact. What will this do to email open rates? How do brands get back into the regular inbox? Is this the end of email marketing?

Managing marketing data can seem like an overwhelming task. Mobile, tablets and social have all transformed the buyer landscape and the way marketers reach their customers and prospects. That said, sophisticated marketing technologies have made it easier for marketing departments of all sizes to augment their databases and “fast-path” their way to more comprehensive information on targets.

According to a Silverpop study by Forrester Consulting, marketers who have adopted behavioral marketing practices have realized business benefits ranging from higher return on marketing investment (ROMI) to higher contributions to sales pipelines and revenue.

A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Silverpopreveals that behavioral data remains a largely untapped marketing asset. Forrester found that only 45% of marketers collect and consolidate behavioral data within a single, integrated database.

When it comes to finding new customers and marketing to existing ones, email can be more effective than social media. Acquiring new customers via email marketing has quadrupled since 2009 and now comprises some 7.5 percent of all gained customers.

Multichannel marketing has become mainstream, with 25% of B2B and B2C marketers assessing themselves as mature practitioners. Another 39% of marketers are in transition, and only 7% have no plans tp implement mutichannel strategies, according to a recent report by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Silverpop.

Vertical-based marketing offers a huge opportunity for growth, but it requires a deep understanding of a particular business segment that goes beyond simply adding a few “insider” phrases to generic content. With careful positioning around a benefit statement for a specific market or even accounts within a market, businesses can drive profitable long-term engagements within a vertical, experts told Demand Gen Report.

Most marketers are using marketing automation to scale and standardize marketing processes, but the few who use automation to focus on customer behavior on seeing benefits. That’s a key conclusion in a new report by Forrester Research.
The report, "Use Behavioral Marketing to Up the Ante in the Age of the Customer" [registration required], was commissioned by marketing automation provider Silverpop and involved in-depth surveys with 157 marketing professionals in the U.S.

A new commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Silverpop, a digital marketing technology provider, reveals that while marketers who leverage buyer insight in their campaigns experience significant business benefits above their peers, behavioral data still remains the greatest untapped marketing asset.

According to new research by Silverpop, with Forrester Consulting, today’s buyers control the buying process far more than today’s vendors control the selling process, a phenomenon that affects both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers. Buyers seek the information they want online, on the Web and in social channels, as well as in the “real world.” Today’s buyers, though, expect sellers to know where they’ve been, what they’ve seen, what they’ve accepted or rejected, whether that behavior happened on their tablet, via their smartphone, or at the local branch office. Today’s marketers are struggling to keep up.

Two years back, the idea that social media would hasten the death of email marketing was hotly debated in blogs and op-eds throughout the digital marketing community. And while I don’t see it often anymore, I will occasionally stumble upon a blog that states, “Yes, email marketing is very much alive and well.”

So you’ve started your own business.
You’ve moved boxes around to create some (tight) office space in the basement. Your personal cell phone is also your business phone. Your family can barely keep their eyebrows down with questions. Your friends at dinner not-so-secretly think you’ve lost it.
Who’s got your back?
Lucky for your business, and the hundreds of thousands of other similarly bold endeavors out there, the Internet has finally caught up to your entrepreneurial spirit. And now there are dozens of excellent tools on the web designed specifically to help small businesses grow.
Here are seven innovations for your small business:

Marketers, consider this your wake up call. Now, more than ever, buyers have more control over the sales cycle. Many prospects are anywhere from 54% to 80% of the way through the buying cycle (PDF) before they're even comfortable inviting a sales rep into their evaluation process.
Marketers must therefore evolve with the buying cycle and find some new ways to own the early part of the sales process. How? Well, by incorporating recipient behaviors into their marketing strategy.

Modern day marketers need to be aware that their brand messages are at risk of being swallowed up in the abyss that can be email marketing. On average per person, per day consumers are receiving over 30,000 advertising messages, so it is essential that your business stands out from the crowd. Below are my essential, top ten email marketing tips:

According to Gartner, "by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO." Marketing's increasing reliance on IT combined with the shift to customer experience–centric marketing brings a set of core challenges—including getting a 360-degree view of cross-channel customer data to make the right decisions and accelerate business growth. However, for marketers to leverage data across channels, they need true data integration among customer-facing systems to equip the right stakeholder with the right customer data in real time.

When B2B marketers send out a typical paid tweet, they have to direct leads to a landing page with a form for their name, company, email and any other pertinent bits of data they want to capture. As any marketer knows, when prospects have to go to another site and fill out a form it increases the likelihood that they will just abandon the task.

May

It’s said that the average person is exposed to 30,000 marketing messages a day. To me that’s worrying news for us marketers – especially if it’s your job is to build marketing relationships with consumers.

Twitter began testing a lead generation tool Wednesday in its tweet stream that resembles a cross between a daily deal alert and call-to-action ad in search engine query result pages. It serves up in one of Twitter's Cards, the expandable display unit that allows brands to attach photos or other media.

Lead generation is becoming simpler in practical terms—it's easier than ever before to find and nurture prospective customers. But the forces driving it are complex, including the integration of marketing and sales tools and continued industry consolidation. -

Today is also Pick Strawberries Day, and National Lucky Penny Day is coming up on May 23. If you miss any of these holidays, you have all the rest of May to celebrateNational Barbecue Month. Could any of these days give you a new and interesting hook for your next email campaign?

The IPO drumbeat at Silverpop Systems Inc. is getting louder.
Silverpop has been considering strategic alternatives, including an IPO, for some time, said a long-term investor in the company who is not on the board.

Modern day marketers need to be aware that their brand messages are at risk of being swallowed up in the abyss that can be email marketing. On average per person, per day consumers are receiving over 30,000 advertising messages, so it is essential that your business stands out from the crowd.

Silverpop, the marketing tech company that announced $25 million in new funding last month, is announcing a new feature to help customers adapt to all the different ways that people are opening their emails.

Email marketers experienced an average open rate of 19.7% last year, although top-performing companies had an open rate almost twice as high, a report from email marketing services provider Silverpop found.

Silverpop, a provider of digital marketing technology solutions, announced the growth of its reseller channel. Revenue for its reseller network in Q1 2013 increased 74% as compared to the same time last year, according to company officials.

With his keynote at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit, PaperStyle.com's David Grocer says his company has benefited from Google Analytics to collect data. PaperStyle also uses a Silverpop tool with Web tracking capabilities.

Education, retail, and computer hardware/electronics are the best-performing verticals in email marketing, according to a recent report released by Silverpop that benchmarked open rates, click-through rates, and churn metrics across 14 industries and four geographic regions.

Silverpop Systems Inc . was among the first companies to build email-marketing software but as that space is maturing it has raised $25 million in debt financing to get out the word that it's not an email-marketing company.

Email marketing and marketing automation vendor Silverpop has received US $25 million in new funding, and the company has said it plans to use the cash to continue building out its sales and marketing teams.

Email marketing automation provider Silverpop released its 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark study, analyzing key metrics of fourteen different industries in the U.S. and Canada, as well as countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific. When evaluating open rates, CTRs, CTORs and list churn statistics, the top performing vertical industries included education, computer hardware, telecom and electronics, and retail.

Consumer product emails are the most opened emails and have a median 25.4 percent open rate on average, according to new metrics from email marketing services company Silverpop. The research comes from Silverpop's 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark study, which analyzed email metrics by industry and global region.

The median open rate for emails in the United States last year, according to a study released this week by Silverpop, was 16.5%. If your open rates are cruising along at 20% or above, then, you might have a fairly high opinion of your email prowess. You would be mistaken. You are not even in the top 25% of email marketers.

Curious about the state of email marketing? Silverpop has released the findings of its 2013 Email Marketing Benchmarks Study, which showed that email is still an effective channel for delivering personalized, dynamic messages at the right time.

Email marketing automation provider Silverpop released its 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark study, analyzing key metrics of fourteen different industries in the U.S. and Canada, as well as countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific. When evaluating open rates, CTRs, CTORs and list churn statistics, the top performing vertical industries included education, computer hardware, telecom and electronics, and retail.

Silverpop, a digital marketing technology provider that unifies marketing automation, email, mobile and social, announced the findings of its 2013 Email Marketing Benchmarks Study yesterday. The report goes beyond standard email marketing benchmarks, providing a breakdown of data by top-quartile, median and bottom-quartile performers as well as analysis by industry and geography. In this year's report, education, computer hardware, telecom, and electronics and retail were the highest-performing verticals.

Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey says his company doesn’t “do” the advertising side, but that depends on your definition of advertising. “Advertising is media," says Nussey. "We only deal with that peripherally. We bring a degree of automation to marketing overall, with an emphasis on the relationship side where the ROI is high.”

As Opening Day chatter filled our Facebook and Twitter streams, the folks at Silverpop looked at what the Major League Baseball clubs were doing in social, mobile and email to see the interaction between the fans and the teams in the digital space.

In honor of Opening Day, digital marketing firm Silverpop analyzed the social-mobile activities of all thirty Major League Baseball teams and their fans. Even better, they put their data into an infographic.

Since being acquired by Silverpop a year ago, CoreMotives has increased billings by 136% and added more than 270 customers, bringing the total to 1,500 brands currently using the tool to deliver marketing campaigns from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

It’s Opening Day for Major League Baseball. San Francisco is home to the defending World Series-champion San Francisco Giants. It’s also home to Twitter and, in baseball terms, Facebook. But the Giants place a mediocre fourth in the social media fandom, according to this infographic from Silverpop. But maybe that means the fans watch the games instead of their phones?

It’s Opening Day for Major League Baseball. San Francisco is home to the defending World Series-champion San Francisco Giants. It’s also home to Twitter and, in baseball terms, Facebook. But the Giants place a mediocre fourth in the social media fandom, according to this infographic from Silverpop. But maybe that means the fans watch the games instead of their phones?

March

CoreMotives is a marketing automation platform that operates completely within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Acquired by Silverpop about a year ago, CoreMotives remains a separate offering from its parent's flagship Engage platform, which features its own Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration.

Marketing automation software is big business as Corporate America competes to turn prospects into paying customers. Atlanta is developing into a hotbed for the industry, which according to one estimate will grow 50 percent this year.

Email marketing automation has had such a significant impact in sectors such as financial services, hospitality and retail, that when Forrester outlined the mega-trends that were shaping the market, the growth of automation tools was one of the top contributors.

Recently, most email service providers have converted to a new customized algorithm that calculates deliverability using a combination of the original email delivery rules plus new "engagement" factors: open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints.

In the old days of email marketing, batch and blast was the most effective, not to mention the only, way to reach thousands of contacts at once. It was a reliable method, but it is no longer as practical or beneficial. Contacts are inundated constantly with messages and ads — whether it’s in their inboxes, on social channels or the web. Impersonal, irrelevant messages will receive a quick delete without a second thought.

February

Silverpop just announced the launch of its Digital Marketing University, a multi-city educational roadshow aimed at helping marketers of all types stay informed about today’s constantly evolving digital landscape.

Live blogging from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to catch Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations, Silverpop, speak on using buyer behavior in email campaigns. His presentation was titled, “Let Buyer Behavior Be Your Guide! Delivering Communications that Convert.”

Every year, the Grammy Awards show gathers all the usual suspects for a replay of the year’s favorite hits. Fortunately, outspoken celebrities in crazy outfits still manage to surprise us every time — sometimes with their songs, sometimes with their acceptance speeches. These two infographics show how the artists fared on social media sites before and after the show in 2013.

Social media has become an indispensable part of the music business. It used to be that winning a Grammy was one of the best way for a new artist to enter into the public imagination. Now, they enter through social media, and the Grammys naturally follow.

January

2012 was a game changing year for the marketing automation (MA) industry. Major acquisitions, such as ExactTarget's purchase of Pardot and Oracle's procurement of Eloqua, sparked an increased interest in the MA realm and strengthened the bond between marketing and technology.

Silverpop, the Atlanta-based digital marketing technology provider that unifies marketing automation, email, mobile and social, achieved impressive new business growth of 40 percent as compared to 2011 and added 380 new customers, a third of which turned to the company for its marketing automation offerings.

Silverpop, a digital marketing technology provider, reported that in 2012 new business grew 40% and it signed 380 new customers, with one-third of those choosing the company’s marketing automation offerings.

With all the focus on social media, it seems that email marketing is almost an afterthought for many companies. Email may not be trendy, but it’s cheap, easy to measure, and easy to target. It's a good place to do testing, it keeps your brand visible, and at the end of the day it delivers results.

Whether a visitor to your website is coming directly from a social network or is just one of the millions of people who make social a part of their daily lives, offering the option of signing in with a social login (e.g., Facebook or Twitter) as an alternative to filling out a form has clear benefits.

Recently it seems as if mobile email has become the No. 1 discussion topic among digital marketers. What's the impact? How do you give subscribers the best email experience in order to get the highest engagement and conversion rates? How important is mobile optimization, anyway?

Christina Pappas articipated in the Friday #profschat Tweetchat on email marketing and was really interested to hear and learn about all the challenges marketers are still facing when it comes to developing and executing truly effective email campaigns.

December

As we close out 2012, we can’t think of a better idea than to look at some of the digital numbers that may surprise you, confirm what you already know, and hopefully inspire you look at how your business and marketing plans can adapt.

With the right approach to building a marketing budget, B2B companies can clarify their business development goals, gain organizational direction for marketing and position themselves for more profitable growth.

Triggered email messages—the marketing appeals based on an event or action taken by a consumer, like a birthday or abandoned cart—yield 75% higher open rates and 115% higher click-through-rates than business-as-usual (BAU) emails. Yet triggered emails account for less than 3% of total email volume.

Shoppers braving long lines to snatch up Black Friday sales had coffee on their minds. A word cloud from digital marketing technology provider Silverpop lists “coffee,” “deals” and “sale” among the words Twitter users said the most on the popular post-Thanksgiving shopping day.

While the roots of social media can be traced back to email, USENET and the launch of the World Wide Web in the 1970s and 1980s, the phenomenon that we know and enjoy today found life with Friendster and Myspace (in 2002 and 2003 respectively), and then really took off when Facebook launched in 2004.

For many, using the Internet means being on a social network, and with the rise of web connected smartphones we have never been more able to share our daily goings on. Accordingly ,the growth in social network users has been substantial over the last decade.

Ellen Valentine, product evangelist at Silverpop and my guest this week on Marketing Smarts, has an interesting perspective on the perennial tension between Marketing and Sales: Technology is to blame!

October

This year’s presidential candidates have been reaching out nonstop to their constituents through email, hoping the online messages help increase fundraising efforts, turnout at conventions, and the number of voters at the polls next week. Digital marketing technology provider Silverpop analyzed 400 messages between the two candidates, their vice presidential partners and even their wives since August 2012 to see what their email campaigns have accomplished.

Facebook recently released its “Custom Audiences” feature, which allows digital markets to run advertising campaigns targeted specifically to certain customers and prospects. With nearly 83 percent of marketers using Facebook, what can marketers actually do with this new tool?

As if marketers weren’t strapped enough for time, today’s empowered buyers have more channels than ever to choose from and are waiting until later in the buying cycle to interact with businesses. If and when they do cross paths with you, they expect you to be more helpful and more personal than ever — especially if you’re expecting them to share your brand content with their social networks.

As business leaders work to align both Sales and Marketing within their organizations, a common question that arises is how to compensate members of each team. While sales positions have traditionally been incentivized by commission-based pay and high earning-potentials, compensation for marketers is still commonly based on flat salaries.

At the MarketingProfs B2B Forum earlier this month, Maribeth Ross of NetProspex led a lively discussion featuring Ross Graber, research director of marketing operations at SiriusDecisions; Ellen Valentine, evangelist at Silverpop; and Edward Burke, demand generation manager at Ness Technologies.Here's a summary of the smarts that the panel imparted.

The public is fast learning how to dodge and ignore the hail of political email, quickly diminishing the impact of what’s been a reliable and low-cost campaign tool.
Open rates for marketing-related emails are now at historic lows — more than 80 percent go unread — a trend that is scary to campaign operatives who rely on it as their primary mode of communications with potential donors, voters and volunteers.

The newsletter is where two of the most valuable marketing tools come together: email and content. It is a prime opportunity to not only recognize the power shift from marketer to consumer, but also embrace and optimize for it.

What’s behavioural marketing, how does it work and how can retailers use it most effectively? These were just some of the questions that Richard Austin, emarketing strategy consultant at Silverpop, tackled in a recent Internet Retailing webinar, Behavioural marketing: beyond email marketing.

The iPhone 5 new feature announcements along with the iOS 6 operating system upgrade have left many talking about the additions, changes and, most importantly, their implications. For marketers, while there's no single game-changing feature, the iPhone 5/iOS 6 launch is a clear signal to any holdout marketers that we've now reached a point where the need for mobile strategy can no longer be ignored.

Silverpop has announced several additions to its Engage platform. Enhanced dynamic content and lead scoring capabilities give customers additional opportunities to increase engagement and drive more revenue through more personalized campaigns influenced by buyer behavior.

The consumerisation of the B2B marketing landscape is having a profound effect on the way organisations engage a business audience. So how is this shift manifesting itself and why should B2B brands care?

No matter how loyal customers are to a particular brand, they're more likely to socialize brand-related content when offered an attractive, clear-cut incentive. It's a concept some marketers overlook—but not Dairy Queen, says Loren McDonald, VP of industry relations at Silverpop.

August

Silverpop has announced significant, year-on-year new business growth in the first half of 2012. The company experienced a 40% increase in closed new business and more than doubled its new professional services contracts compared to the first half of 2011, meaning the company now powers the marketing campaigns of more than 5,000 brands.

Being customer-centric means looking after the people who buy from you – a simple, desirable goal. But in an ever more complex world of software and social media, true customer-centricity that goes beyond rhetoric is no mean feat.

Silverpop is claiming a 40% increase in closed new business and more than 100% gain in Professional Services contracts compared to the first half of 2011; also, that it now manages the marketing campaigns of more than 5,000 brands.

Digital marketing technology provider, Silverpop, has released its 2012 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study. Based on data collected from Silverpop customers, the Benchmark Study aims to help marketers see where they stand against their peers, while setting goals designed to move them into a top-performing quartile.

Email isn’t just the elder statesman of the digital world. Email also binds all the disparate elements of a marketing program and bridges the gap between online and offline in ways that no other communications channel can.
Granted, there are many brands out there that still do “batch and blast” emailing like it’s 1999. But there are also a growing number of brands that have created world-class email programs.

Email open rates have long been lamented by email marketers, retailers and CPG brands. According to one expert the root cause of low email open rates is ad fatigue - consumers see so many ads on a given day that they just don't want to see more. So, what's an email marketer to do?

July

Average email open rates continued their downward path during 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, though click-through rates (CTRs) increased slightly during the same period, according to Silverpop's Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study.

Once again I've rounded up some of the most interesting digital marketing stats we've seen this week.Stats include the ever-increasing search spend, the open-rates for email marketing, mobile usage stats and a look at what influences our purchase decisions.

The presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney don’t share a lot of ground, but they have at least one thing in common: they both love email, sending dozens of emails a month. What’s the strategy behind the campaigns’ emails to supporters? Mashable turned to digital marketing provider Silverpop, who analyzed every campaign email from early April through June, to find out.

Email marketing is an important customer acquisition and retention tool, but as consumers get bombarded with more and more email messages, how do you know whether your campaign should be judged a success?

A study from digital marketing technology provider Silverpop found that companies that provide personalized behavior-based content are far more likely to receive the highest ranking for open rates, click-through rates and clicks-per-clicker, says Dave Walters, product evangelist at Silverpop.

The top quarter of email marketers enjoy open rates of 43.7% by consumers, while the bottom quarter suffers with just 8%, finds Silverpop, the digital marketing tech provider. The researchers clocked all messages sent by 1,124 brands from 20 countries, for the five quarters ending Q1 2012.

Marketing automation software provider Silverpop is now firmly invested in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM market, one can safely say, with its CoreMotives acquisition now four months in the past and with new integration options recently announced for Dynamics CRM and the Silverpop Engage platform.

Digital marketing technology provider Silverpop has been appointed by international travel company Thomas Cook Scheduled Businesses to become the email marketing technology provider for the Netflights, Gold Medal and Pure Luxury brands.

Digital marketing solution provider Silverpop has announced a new integration between its Engage marketing platform and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The move adds a second presence for Silverpop in this market, following its recent acquisition of CoreMotives.

Marketing automation is on the rise: 59% of senior marketers say they expect the number of automated campaigns to increase over the next 12 months, and 83% expect the use of marketing automation to improve the efficiency of their marketing processes, according to a report by Forrester Research and Silverpop.

Marketers plan to increase the number of automated campaigns, according to a survey by marketing automation company Silverpop and Forrester Research, with 59% reporting they'll boost automated campaigns this year.

May

In a recent IBM study, CMOs acknowledged that to remain relevant they must understand the individual, not the audience. They must speak to each person in a give-and-take, one-to-one dialogue. Email remains the most effective channel to fuel such personalized and relevant communication with individuals across your sales funnel.

A new report from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by marketing automation provider Silverpop, offers little in the way of groundbreaking insights, but does provide plenty of data confirming what most already know: that many companies are failing to realize the true potential from their investments in marketing automation.

The social forms, which have up to 10 fields, prompt users to collect contact information from their fans directly within Facebook. The information gathered is then saved in the reporting section. Another feature of Social Pull is that users can put these forms -- and the related content that they are visiting -- into a so-called "like-gate." That way, the user would have to "like" the page and fill out the form before being able to access the content.

Silverpop, the digital marketing technology provider, has released Social Pull, an app that helps marketers build online forms for Facebook Timeline pages, said Adam Steinberg, segment marketing director of social media for Silverpop.

Let’s face it — today’s consumer is more educated, more self-reliant and more demanding. This means many things for digital marketers. Today’s marketers face the challenge of needing to reach thousands of individuals who are in and out of multiple channels, multiple times each day, at a personal level.

Silverpop recently announced significant growth in its first quarter year-over-year sales performance. Additionally, Silverpop increased its professional services revenue by about 60% and partner-generated new business by nearly 500%, also as compared to Q1 2011.

It’s no secret that LinkedIn company pages are an excellent social channel for B2B marketers -- especially if you take certain steps to ensure you’re optimizing your company’s page to its full potential.

Email marketing firm Silverpop took a look at more than 200 of the GOP candidates’ emails from Jan. 9 up to the present day. The idea? Find out how the candidates are using email and whether they’re subscribing to the same best practices and innovative techniques used by retail marketers.

Email marketing firm Silverpop took a look at more than 200 of the GOP candidates’ emails from Jan. 9 up to the present day. The idea? Find out how the candidates are using email and whether they’re subscribing to the same best practices and innovative techniques used by retail marketers.

Web strategy, design and development provider, Whereoware knew it needed to make its clients' email marketing campaigns mobile-friendly. Working with email service provider Silverpop, Whereoware simplified its emails.

Silverpop, a major player in the red hot marketing automation space, announced at Convergence 2012 that it has acquired marketing automation ISV CoreMotives, a three year old firm focused strictly on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Marketing automation is increasing in popularity but is still approached with caution by many B2B marketers. Joel Harrison, editor at B2B Marketing, asks some of the marketing automation vendors at TFM&A 2012 what the benefits are for B2B marketers.

As the divisions between work and personal life have faded, b-to-b marketers are reevaluating how best to engage enterprise decision makers. With each individual able to carry their business around with them on a tablet or phone, b-to-b marketing has sought a number of ways to reach on-the-go executives, which has meant taking a growing number of approaches from the consumer playbook.

February

Adding contacts to your prospect list is the necessary first step in building a comprehensive database of preference and behaviors that will enable marketers to send automated, triggered and highly relevant messages. People are accessing more channels than ever — whether it’s email, social media, web sites or their smartphones and tablets.

We're back from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas, and we've gone through our stacks of notes to give you the top five insights to improve your email marketing. You get tips on deliverability, optimizing designs, boosting lists and more.

Any traveler knows there's a big difference between sitting in a middle seat in coach and stretching out in first class. When travelers are looking to do business with travel and tourism companies, they're looking for just that — a first-class experience. This should include the way you communicate with them through your marketing messages. Here are five tips travel and tourism companies can use to upgrade their marketing programs to preferred status.

January

Much has been made of the various presidential candidates mobile strategies, as well as the introduction of Foursquare as a fund raising tool.Little attention has been paid to that most basic of digital marketing strategies: email. Loren McDonald at Silverpop explores some of the trends he is noticing among the candidates thus far.

Silverpop, a provider of email marketing and automation solutions, recently reported that 20% of its new business in 2011 was driven by partner relationships. Additionally, a third of current Silverpop customers are now using at least one Silverpop partner to complement their marketing efforts through Engage.

Implementing share-to-social features to its email program helped Dairy Queen increase coupon redemptions and grow its Blizzard Fan Club database by nearly 1 million new members, to over 3.8 million members.

Dairy Queen recently used content and social marketing tools provided by a company usually identified for its email marketing prowess—Silverpop—to drive its fan club membership and boost store traffic.

DemandGen Report polled leading experts in the demand generation space for their outlook on these key emerging trends. As highlighted in the upcoming State of Demand Generation 2012 Report, thought leaders pointed to the following emerging trends for 2012.

Email marketing has come a long way from spamming (and irritating) consumers with mass messages that are quickly deleted. Thanks to advances in technology, marketers can target potential customers with email messages that are personalized and trackable. Plus, many email marketing services today offer solutions that include social media integration, consumer tracking, segmentation, and marketing automation.

December

2011 was the most exciting year yet for location-based marketing - full of growth, consolidation, new-product releases and an ever-increasing number of users. As December comes to a close, Silverpop thought they’d look back on the year that was and highlight some of the key developments in location-based marketing in 2011.

Social media check-ins provide marketers an unprecedented view into the lives of their customers and prospects. Knowing location, and understanding actual behaviors, creates opportunities to captivate an audience with greater relevance during moments when they are most receptive.
See six tactics that exploit the synergies between check-in and email programs, and allow you to increase opt-ins and better understand your audience, reaching them with relevant offers as they engage with your brand.

Holiday traditions are a big part of what makes the season so special. But, sometimes, even the most time-honored traditions need a little freshening up. Holiday marketing programs are no different. Most marketers make some kind of effort to take advantage of the big buying season, but sometimes those initiatives are colder than the frigid air outside.

November

With the rise of social media, marketing channel integration has never been more important. Understanding and leveraging the social buzz in order to inform other campaigns and channels—in particular that corporate workhorse, email—can produce a marketing ROI greater than the sum of its parts.

Silverpop's email delivery system can create message arcs that not only send emails out on a set schedule, but can also dynamically change the content of those emails to reflect the recipient's current relationship with a campaign.

With consumer holiday spending projected to be flat compared to last year, it's become ever-more important for retailers to deliver memorable, consistent experiences to customers across all of the channels they use, whether it's for product research, purchases, or support.

Loren McDonald says the convergence of mobile, social, local and email, or “mocial,” is forcing marketers to change the way they interact with customers and prospects to ensure that they are where their customers and prospects are, all the time.

October

A recent E-Mail Marketing Services Vendor Landscape report published by Info-Tech Research Group ranked Silverpop as a Champion in the E-Mail Marketing Services market. Advances in consumer tracking, segmentation, and marketing automation by E-Mail Marketing Services have elevated success rates for email marketing campaigns to a very high level.

The acquisition of PlacePunch will broaden Silverpop's capabilities in the geolocation technology niche considerably. In particular, its toolset will make it much easier for companies to integrate check-in messages with loyalty programs and even multichannel initiatives, said Loren McDonald.

E-mail and marketing services firm Silverpop Systems Inc. said today it had bought PlacePunch, a marketing agency that runs location-based campaigns across social sharing sites such as Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter.

Many marketers are looking for ways to make ecommerce simpler for the consumer; one option is the social sign-in, or allowing consumers to make a purchase using a social profile rather than creating an all-new profile for each retail hub.

Social and local forms of communication are gaining popularity daily, but a Silverpop survey shows that email is still playing a crucial role and the email list databases are far larger than their “likes” on Facebook or followers on Twitter.

Loren McDonald, VP-industry relations with online marketing company Silverpop, was named the winner of the first Stefan Pollard Marketer of the Year Award, at the Direct Marketing Association's Email Evolution Conference--where keynote speaker Gary Vaynerchuk discussed the need for email marketers to get more personal.

November

Silverpop's Engage App is now available on Salesforce's ChatterExchange, providing its customers with various marketing options based on Chatter's social feed, including automatically generating Chatter posts when a prospect downloads a file, submits a Web form, reaches a pre-determined lead score or enters a lead-nurturing program.

Silverpop's Vice President of Industry Relations Loren McDonald discusses how triggered emails are more powerful than broadcast emails, and Silverpop client, Carolyn Nye, marketing manager for S&S Worldwide chimes in to agree and add that abandoned cart triggers are more effective at engaging customers.

Silverpop's Vice President of Industry Relations Loren McDonald offers retail marketers five tips to spread good cheer among online customers while increasing revenue, recovering lost purchases and building customer loyalty.

September

In this article, Silverpop client Tafford Uniforms talks about their "more is better" email marketing strategy and its pay off for their business. Also, Loren McDonald, Silverpop's vice president of industry relations chimes in to discuss mobile and email marketing.

With buying processes becoming less formal and sales representatives’ engagement being pushed back later in the buying cycle, lead nurturing is becoming an imperative tactic to start and maintain the conversation. During Silverpop's B2B Marketing University event in NYC, four lead nurturing levers were discussed to support the buyer-centric approach.

Silverpop's Director of Field Marketing and B2B Evangelist weighs in on the issue of marketing automation providers offering free versions of their product. "Marketing automation platforms are pretty sophisticated tools that are there to enable and support demand gen programs through lead management processes and content marketing processes," he said. I firmly believe that the processes have to happen before or in tandem with the technologies.”

Silverpop's CEO Bill Nussey joins the discussion about IBM's recent acquisition of Unica, saying this deal "highlights the emerging importance of analyzing and acting on the behaviors of customers — and their linkages to revenues — as the primary driver for marketing programs.”

According to Silverpop's Director of Field Marketing and B2B Evangelist Adam Needles, content marketing in the modern era must be rationalized against the buyer and where they are in the buying process. "Unfortunately," he said, "too much time is spent on logistics and planning while content development is left to the end."

July

Fabric.com, the world’s leading online fabric store, has increased conversions and average order size by implementing a highly successful lifecycle email marketing campaign and a shopping cart abandonment program.

Do B2B marketers really know where their emails are going? In the latest online issue of DM News, Silverpop’s Director of Deliverability Robert Consoli tackles this question, and dispels common misconceptions about B2B email marketing while sharing best practices on deliverability.

Silverpop's Director of Field Marketing and B2B Evangelist Adam Needles definitely thinks webinars are worth it. In this article, he discusses how different kinds of webinars should be used for different stages in the sales cycle.

For some online sellers, the number of shopping carts that are abandoned exceeds the number of completed purchases. Yet many Web merchants shy away from sending triggered follow-up e-mails to visitors who left a site with unpurchased items still in their cart. Silverpop client S&S Worldwide’s success with its cart-abandonment e-mail campaign could change their minds.

Silverpop's CEO Bill Nussey is recognized in BtoB Magazine's annual Who's Who in BtoB Marketing issue. Nussey is recognized for his role in guiding Silverpop's best practices and innovations in email marketing and marketing automation.

To uncover the tactics retailers are using to engage customers, Silverpop researchers reviewed the email marketing programs of top retailers in America, Australia and the United Kingdom. The findings reveal interesting similarities and some surprising differences.

May

The number of Australian businesses seeking on-demand marketing solutions continues to grow rapidly in 2010, with email marketing provider Silverpop signing a raft of new clients across a broad range of industries in the last six months.

It's not easy to be a B2B or a B2C marketer these days. Both sides are struggling to grab attention and keep it while also seeking new ways to drive revenue and prove their worth. Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey points out that the two groups have more in common than just these challenges and can learn quite a bit from each other.

To make your message stand out in an era of engagement marketing, marketers must listen to their customers. Silverpop's Loren McDonald discusses ways to find out what interests and appeals to your subscribers.

If you’re a B2C marketer and think your B2B counterparts have it easier, you’re wrong. The opposite is also true. Both sides seek new ways to drive revenue and increase ROI, and struggle to make their messages stand out among cluttered inboxes. Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at Silverpop, explains more.

Silverpop customer Cuddledown, a multichannel retailer specializing in bed comforters and other home furnishings, is engaging its best customers by sending them more relevant marketing e-mail based on data such as purchasing history.

Silverpop's recent poll of more than 1,800 marketers (“Exploring the Differences and Similarities of B2C and B2B Marketing Tactics”) found that while 42% of b-to-c marketers are including links to social networking sites in their e-mail marketing campaigns, only 29% of b-to-b marketers have done similar integration.

Said Bill Nussey, Silverpop's CEO: “For some time now, I felt that the solutions supporting BtoC and BtoB marketers should come together into a single, scalable platform that makes the unique tools of each marketing discipline available to all, and our clients have overwhelmingly agreed.”
Silverpop recently announced the launch of a new digital marketing platform designed to combine email-marketing tools with its top-ranked marketing automation and lead management applications.

Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-mail marketers have different targets, but the goals they share mean they agree on the effectiveness of several tactics.
According to a Silverpop poll, both groups consider identifying the best time to send messages the most effective e-mail marketing tactic.

Silverpop Vice President of Client Support Clara Hoban tells companies how high-level customer support can help them create a strong brand, enhance reputation, build loyalty, showcase maturity, and create a more personal relationship with its customers.

According to Silverpop's Vice President of Industry Relations Loren McDonald, the role of e-mail marketing is being driven by people's behavior and successful B2B marketers are using e-mail as a strategic tool to move people down the sales funnel.

Rae Thompson, vice president of marketing for USA Financial, talked to BtoB Online about their lead management program before Silverpop and the record results they've achieved since implementing the powerful marketing solution.

Silverpop launches its new Engage 8 platform, which will offer the CRM, marketing automation, lead management and lead nurturing solutions of the B2B product, combined with the e-mail and social tools of the B2C marketing solution.

Online conversations are occurring with more regularity as people increasingly turn to social communities, networks and blogs to voice their opinions—good and bad—about various brands and businesses. How can companies thrive in this marketplace gone social? Silverpop's Scott Voigt suggests you follow the three “E’s”

While the best gauge of marketing success is whether an email program meets the company’s business objectives, benchmark data provides an understanding about what works well and what needs to be tweaked. Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at Silverpop explains more.

Silverpop has partnered with ClickTale, the industry leader in Customer Experience Analytics, to help customers more effectively track consumers’ online behavior and better understand what engages them.

February

Transactional e-mails—order confirmations, shipping notifications, billing statements, and the like—are known to have appreciably higher open rates than marketing e-mails. So if you’re not using these messages to bolster your brand’s relationship with the recipient and even to encourage additional sales, you’re truly missing out on a prime opportunity.

January

According to Selling Power, reputation sets Silverpop apart from other marketing solutions. In this product highlight, Silverpop is featured for its strong performance and consistent praise by marketing automation experts.

Silverpop, the world's only provider of both email marketing and marketing automation solutions specifically tailored to the unique needs of B2C and B2B marketers, was named a Finalist in the "Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year" category in the fourth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Email marketing firm Silverpop said that as the travel and tourism industry looks toward a recovery -- albeit gradual -- its clients are increasingly turning to interactive marketing, including email, to stand out.

Silverpop's Director of Field Marketing Adam Needles weighs in on B2B marketing in 2010, and predicts that in two or three years the market will see a lot of new features and expansion of the way marketers use these tools to address buyers further up and further down the funnel.

Silverpop's Vice President of Marketing Scott Voigt informs B2B marketers how Webinars can create win-win scenarios by continually supplying their prospects with information that helps reach their own business goals.

Silverpop client Cuddletown, a home goods and apparel merchant, grew its fourth quarter direct sales by 53% over 2009. In this article, the company explains how they enhanced their email strategy and created special offers for certain segments of their list.

B2B marketers who develop consistent lead-management processes––along with careful investments in automation––achieve stronger, more qualified sales pipelines, according to interviews conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Silverpop.

Weight management program and food company Atkins Nutritionals has launched a sampling campaign to grow the company's e-mail and direct mail database. The effort is Atkins' first with Silverpop, which is also helping the company change its newsletter's frequency from monthly to weekly.

Email marketers say the recession continues, but nearly 90% will invest as much or more in the platform in 2010 than they did this year. A survey from email marketing firm Silverpop shows 41% are planning on boosting spending and an additional 47% are looking at making no cuts.

Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey says the email marketing firm is frequently approached by investment banks urging it to go public. But while an IPO is the end game, he said there is still more time on the clock.

A new Silverpop study shows that online marketers’ e-mail lists are significantly larger and their mail volume is higher this Christmas-shopping season over last while open and click rates have held relatively steady.

Social networking, SMS, and customer reviews aren’t in and of themselves new concepts. But using them in conjunction with email is, if not new, underused, according to marketing solutions provider Silverpop.

Silverpop, an Atlanta-based e-mail marketing solutions provider, has strengthened its position as the service provider of choice for the online gaming industry by adding several well-known firms to its growing client roster.

A new study of social email practices by Silverpop has found that ‘social sharing’ (in which recipients share noteworthy emails with their friends on social networks) already outperforms ‘forward-to-a-friend’ linking.

Silverpop distributor, Engage Digital, has appointed a new head of its sales team to boost the sales effort for Silverpop’s email marketing and marketing automation solutions in the Australian and New Zealand market.

Will Schnabel, vice president of international markets for Silverpop, offers advice on how to fix six common email marketing mistakes that can affect a program’s ability to attract and retain subscribers, boost loyalty and increase revenues and return on investment.

July

Last year, online fabric store Fabric.com revamped its e-mail program to be more life cycle and behavior focused and since then has seen open and click-through rates double and conversions increase by 43%. The e-commerce site wanted to increase e-mail engagement and in April 2008 began working with their e-mail services firm Silverpop to do so.

An exciting new age in marketing has arrived in which interacting and building relationships with customers is the key to delivering unprecedented ROI explains Will Schnabel, vice president and general manager of international markets, Silverpop.